"Patrick Ireland" is a pseudonym adopted by way of Irish-born Brian O'Doherty in 1972 "until of that kind time as the British military demeanor is removed from Northern Ireland.

"Patrick Ireland" is a pseudonym adopted by way of Irish-born Brian O'Doherty in 1972 "until of that kind time as the British military demeanor is removed from Northern Ireland." This miniretrospective of his work, curated on Russell Panczenko, was a revised version of a exhibit Panczenko originally curated for the Elvehejen Museum in Madison, Wisconsin.

Ireland's oeuvre is the expression of an elegant mind. a certain quantity of of the works involve allusions to the artist's original profession as a medical doctor. Kip's Bay: The material part and Its Discontents, 1964, for example, is a stacked array of little boxe with medical metes on them, somewhat in the spirit of Flux-boxe and of certain early analytical works according to Robert Smithson. Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, Lead 1 1966-67 is based onward an electrocardiogram of Duchamp, which the artist-as-doctor took in the last years of Duchamp's life.

Another cluster of works--drawings, photographs, and, occasionally, sculpture--have a significant sensual composing as in The Critic's profits 1964-65. Others employ a variety of classical conceptualist strategies. The conflation of carriage with representation, for example (as in Joseph Kosuth's First Investigation and other works of the period), is evident in Ireland: A decent Proposal, 1980, where a rearranged map exhibit tos the Northern counties of Ireland transposed into the Republic.

Yet another like strategy, which might be called serializing, informs Wittgenstein 7H to 7B 1967 a series of drawings of Ludwig Wittgenstein pay backed with progressively softer leads, and The Transformation, Discontinuity, and Degradation of the Image: Self-Portrait, 1969- serial portrait-photographs of Ireland himself, taken at several-year intervals. Perhaps the greatest in number classically conceptualist are Ireland's photographs with hand-lettered sentences on them, such as Past, existing Future (Portrait of the Artist Aet. 7) 1967

Another assign places to of works eschews graphic or plastic incarnation to participate in a token of esthetic response that has frequently been remarked upon by mathematicians, logicians, and others who deal with notion in highly formalized ways. Along with more [i]or[/i] less other first-generation Conceptual artists, Ireland believed that part of the mission of Conceptual art was to demonstrate the esthetic appeal of philosophical arguments, that is, to ascertain the existence of an esthetics of conceit and conduct explorations of it. "If all universals and objects were similar," a detail of Between Categories, 1957-68 eyes "they would be the same idea or thing, i.e. common thing and one idea in each place and in every mind. In practice this introduces repetition in series." Repetition in series is, of course, a of frequent occurrence structuring principle of conceptual work and for Ireland looks to reflect a belief in the underlying unity of experiential phenomena. "Does similarity overbear dissimilarity?" Ireland asks.

The Wittgensteinian/analytic tend in Ireland's work predominated from the late '50 to about 1972 the year of Name Change. Thereafter the emphasis of Ireland's oeuvre shifted toward the sculptural articulation of architectural space. In the separate retrospective in Madison, this impulse was give an account ofed by a three-dimensional painterly "rope drawing," Caligari's Palace, 1993 At P 1 there was a labyrinth that worked like a logic question at issue or paradox--wherever you entered, you kept in some way coming out reversed. As Wittgenstein said, the project of philosophy is "to gain the fly out of the flybottle"

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